Personal & Team Development in an SME - Genoa Black

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Personal & Team Development in an SME

As a small to medium business, we understand the barriers that can get in the way of developing our people. We hold learning and development at the heart of what we do, and we recognise that development plays a key role in making sure we have the right people, in the right place to deliver for our customers.

Statistically, there are now more people working for small to medium businesses within the UK than in larger corporations, than ever before.

In recent months we were approached to design and deliver a workshop, tailored to the team at Genoa Black, a specialist marketing agency based in Edinburgh. The programme we developed for Genoa Black was aimed at assisting them to develop their personal and team effectiveness potential. The team at Genoa Black also agreed that this would be an ideal opportunity to explore the benefits of the Insights Discovery profiling tool. Insights Discovery is based on the work of Carl Jung* and has been developed to provide specific processes that can be used throughout the world and recognised as one of the most accurate and thorough profiling tools available today.

The objectives set for an Insights Discovery workshop are simple:

· To explore and discover more about ourselves and our personality types.

· To be able to recognise and appreciate the diverse range of personality types and how they can each add value within a team setting.

· To learn how to adapt and connect with other personalities.

· How to take action and put this learning to practical use back in the workplace.

Ahead of the event, the individual members of the team completed an Insights Discovery evaluator online. This consisted of a series of 25 groups of four statements and takes about twenty minutes to complete. On the workshop, the team explored their personalities through a series of interactive exercises covering “How well do you know me”, “Perceptions” and “Stepping out” to identify their personality preferences.

Insights Discovery uses easily understood language and describes the basis of personality around four colour energies. Fiery Red personalities can be described as big, bold and challenging. Sunshine Yellow is passionate, optimistic and enthusiastic. Earth Green is associated with caring, value based and people focussed behaviour and Cool Blues are principle, factual and analytical. Of course, some of these positives can be overplayed and the team explored overplayed decisiveness as aggressive, too much optimism as unrealistic, over caring as passive and excess data gathering as cold.

We issued the team with an individual profile consisting of an overview, strengths and weaknesses, value to the team, communications strategies and more. The theory behind Insights Discovery is fully developed to add substance to the average of 95% accuracy of the profiles. Typical reactions from delegates are “How do you know me so well?” and even “Have you been stalking me?”.

We practiced how to adapt our communications to gain the most from our interactions with each other to bring practical value back to the workplace. Finally we “walked the team wheel”. In this exercise we considered the overall strengths of the team, how they prefer to make decisions, deal with pressure and fill any gaps in the makeup of the team. In practice a team of diverse personalities makes the most successful team, however through exploring our secondary and tertiary energies we can encourage teams to utilise their less obvious assets.

“Our objectives as a team, before the day, were to explore and hopefully discover more about ourselves and our individual personality types, to then recognise and ultimately appreciate the diverse range of personalities within our team and as a consequence understand and acknowledge their value to both the team and our business. In reality we discovered so much more about ourselves and each other.

We not only learned through discussion and activities how to recognise, to then connect and adapt ourselves to the other personalities but we were able to collectively embrace and take our learning back to the workplace and put the newly acquired skills and knowledge into practical use. We constantly use the language of Insights within the team and I am currently planning the next available slot for all of us to take part in the next workshop to further develop and deepen our understanding of ourselves, one another and the infinite possibilities of the collective.”

Karina McFall, Internal Brand and HR Manager, Genoa Black

We constantly use the language of Insights within the team… we discovered so much more about ourselves and each other.